Canvs Helps Turner Target Branded Content

Research company Canvs is providing data on emotional reactions that will help Turner Broadcasting better target branded content.

Canvs’ technology scouts Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and measures 56 different types of emotional responses—such as exciting or annoying—to programming and branded material.

By finding the funniest moments in shows, for example, Turner can emphasize them in branded content, which it distributes both through social media as well as on its TV networks.

Canvs provides its data in real time, allowing Turner to adjust the campaigns it runs for clients while they’re still appearing.

"We've cracked the nut on viewer emotionality surrounding content, and we're glad Turner sees the value in leveraging Canvs insights to deliver content and facilitate brand experiences that viewers welcome," said Jared Feldman, founder and CEO at Canvs. “Leveraging real-time Emotional Reactions will help Turner’s brand partners identify and market to groups of like-minded fans when they’re still emotionally-charged and rallied around a particular topic or piece of content.”

Turner launched Turner Ignite earlier this year, which combines its branded content and data capabilities. Turner also created Launchpad, which accesses social data in order to inform the creation of branded content.

"When people are emotionally involved with content they are more inclined to share it on social media," said Frank Kavilanz, VP of social, Turner Ignite. “By aligning with Canvs, we gain deeper understanding of the moments that trigger emotional reaction, providing our team the insight to react and promote branded content to the right audiences and unlock the full potential of a client’s social campaign."

Turner says it has launched a dozen campaigns using Launchpad to date for clients including Bethesda, Intel, WB, AT&T, HP and Cinemax.

“We’re finding a very interesting dynamic in studios and video game houses because you have the window leading up to the release then you have another movie from the same studio in a similar genre launching a few months later,” Kavilanz said.

“We’re seeing nice traction there where it’s no longer just one video or one campaign. We’re seeing a campaign consisting of 4 to 6 videos at a time or multiple releases,” he said. “For example with Bethesda we have already done things with them for Fallout 4 and with Doom and we’re leveraging the insights from the first execution to inform the next execution with them and future ones as well.”

Turner is also starting to use the Canvs data in areas other than branded content.

Canvs is able to gauge sentiment even with a tricky millennial audience.

“When we look at a program like Teen Wolf, millennial heavy, sentiment tools struggle to understand the language that millennials use,” said Feldman. "65% of the opinions shared about a millennial based programming go as completely unrecognized by sentiment tools.”

“We’ve designed a platform that is more accurate in its approach,” Feldman said.

“If we tell you something is funny, you can actually see the verbatims that are plotted every single second so you know that Conan makes this really funny joke in a piece of branded content for a video game and you can see immediately what percentage of the audience found it funny,” he said. “That level of granularity and actionability are being presented with the domain knowledge that we have and based on this very accurate approach. Those things all combine to make it relatively simple to adopt a system like Canvs for the purposes of qualitative analysis.”